new delhi, April 25: Brick and mortar universities may soon become an outdated concept in technical education if a proposal mooted by the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) finds its way through the government.

Based on the idea that online universities—real universities accessed through the Internet—can enrich science and engineering education by expanding the range of experiments that students are exposed to during the course of their education, the IITs have proposed setting up of virtual universities along with Internet laboratories to meet the demands of an increasing number of engineering students across the country.

According to the proposal—mooted by IIT-Madras director M.S. Ananth and being developed by IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad—online laboratories will be set up in the first stage to help students who are already benefiting from the HRD ministry-funded National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) project to do lab experiments as well.

The labs are likely to be integrated with NPTEL in the advanced stages and later developed as part of virtual universities. Unlike conventional laboratories, Internet laboratories can be shared across a university or across the world.

“There is a proposal to set up a virtual university, which is in the planning stage. We want at least 500 courses to be ready and uploaded on NPTEL by then. Universities in their present form may not be able to cope up with the increasing number of engineering students. IITs are discussing the matter. The proposal also includes virtual labs on the web where a student of NPTEL will be able to carry out experiments equivalent to lab experiments,” Dr Surendra Prasad, IIT-D director said.

He said the project to develop the laboratories, which is yet to get the HRD ministry’s nod, is likely to cost Rs 50 crore.

The NPTEL project currently provides online access to five streams of engineering—civil, computer science, electronics and communication, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering—in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to 70,000 students registered with it. The NPTEL courses are available as both digitally-taped classroom lectures and web-based lecture materials. NPTEL also provides links to high-end research works on its website www.nptel.iitm.ac.in.

Dr Ananth, the national coordinator for the NPTEL project, is also said to have proposed that 50-100 places across the country be selected where such labs can be set up in select engineering colleges. “Labs would be open to college students but as a policy, NPTEL students from rural areas will be allowed to use them during summer for three months in a year,” said a senior IIT-Madras official.

The internet laboratories, Dr Prasad said, will be developed on the lines of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s iLabs, which, as part of their Open Courseware Consortium, displays lecture notes, previous exams and study materials for anyone to access.

At MIT, iLab teams have created remote laboratories in microelectronics, chemical engineering, polymer crystallisation, structural engineering, and signal processing as case studies for understanding the complex requirements of operating remote lab experiments and scaling their use to large groups of students at the institute and around the world. Based on the experiences of different iLab development teams, the iLabs Project is developing a host of software tools that makes it efficient to bring online and manage complex laboratory experiments.

“The vision is to share expensive equipment and educational material as broadly as possible with students wanting to access them,” said an official.

The proposed labs and the university also aims to meet the growing demand for engineering courses. Currently, engineering colleges in the country have been growing at 20 per cent a year. But despite the rise in colleges, India still needs well over 10,000 Ph.Ds and twice as many M.Tech. degree holders to improve research and development, according to findings of the U R Rao Committee. Further, according to a McKinsey Global Institute study on the emerging global labour market, India produces a large number of engineering graduates every year, but multinationals find just 25 per cent of them employable.